Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem have found their latest joint venture…

The 41-year-old Spanish actress and her 46-year-old Spanish actor husband, considered a power couple in Hollywood, have signed on to star in Escobar, the latest film about the rise of Colombian drug cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar for Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp.

The biopic will be based on Virginia Vallejo’s 2008 Spanish-language memoir Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar.

Vallejo is the Colombian journalist whose career came to a halt in the mid-1990s after it was revealed she had a romantic relationship with Escobar in the mid-’80s. She published her memoir in 2007 and she had to seek asylum in the U.S. three years later, according to her website.

Fernando León de Aranoa will pen the adaptation and direct the pic, which is ramping up now for a production start sometime this year.

Bardem and León de Aranoa previously collaborated on 2002’s Spanish-language Mondays in the Sun.

EuropaCorp will finance, distribute and co-produce Escobar with Pinguin Films and Dean Nichols Productions.